Search This Blog

The CIA's Watchdog Is Resigning After Revealing That Spies Hacked the Senate

The CIA's Watchdog Is Resigning After Revealing That
Spies Hacked the Senate

Inspector General David Buckley will step down at the end
of the month, the agency said.

By Dustin Volz

January 5, 2015 The CIA's internal watchdog will resign
at the end of January, a departure that comes just months after his office
found that the spy agency had hacked into computers used by Senate staffers to
investigate its Bush-era "enhanced interrogation techniques," the CIA
said Monday.

David Buckley will leave the agency on Jan. 31 to
"pursue an opportunity in the private sector," the CIA said in a
statement. Christopher Sharpley, the deputy CIA inspector general, will serve
as acting inspector general upon Buckley's departure.

The CIA indicated that Buckley's resignation was both
amicable and planned, although it comes after a particularly tumultuous year
for the agency, which was enveloped in controversy leading up to the release
last month of the Senate torture report.

"David has served the CIA and the American public as
our inspector general for more than four years," CIA Director John Brennan
said in the statement. "Throughout his tenure, he has demonstrated
independence, integrity, and sound judgment in promoting efficiency,
effectiveness, and accountability at CIA."

In July, Buckley's office concluded that CIA employees
had covertly hacked into computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee
staffers to investigate the spy agency's harsh interrogation methods deployed
at foreign blacksites during the George W. Bush administration after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Buckley's findings represented a stunning rebuke of the
CIA and Director Brennan, who had emphatically denied allegations lobbed by
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein that the agency had
accessed her panel's computers in order to remove certain documents—a maneuver
she described in a fiery floor speech as a likely violation of the
Constitution.

The Senate Intelligence Committee leader accused the CIA
of interfering with its investigation into the agency's old interrogation
programs.

"As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into
Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth.… That's beyond the
scope of reason," Brennan said at the time.

But Buckley's office concluded that some CIA employees
had in fact attempted to retrieve certain agency documents without appropriate
permission. The hacking was "inconsistent with the common
understanding" brokered between the CIA and its Senate overseers, agency
spokesman Dean Boyd said at the time.

Buckley's investigation forced Brennan to apologize to
Feinstein and Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the panel's top Republican. It also
prompted Brennan to submit Buckley's findings to an accountability board led by
retired Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. The board's review is ongoing, but The New
York Times, citing unnamed officials, reported last month that the panel would
recommend against punishing any employees involved in the hacking scandal.

In a statement, Feinstein praised Buckley for serving
with "distinction and intergrity" during his four years as CIA
inspector general.

"It is critically important to have a strong,
independent inspector general at the CIA due to the nature of the work done
there, and Mr. Buckley filled the role admirably," she added.

The still-secret document that prompted the CIA's spying
on its Senate overseers is known as the Panetta Review, an internal examination
of the agency's enhanced-interrogation program commissioned by former CIA
Director Leon Panetta.

Several Democratic senators have said the Panetta Review
corroborates their report, which stated that the use of extreme techniques such
as waterboarding did not lead to valuable national security intelligence and
that the CIA systematically misled the White House, Congress, and the public
about the severity and importance of the program.

Former Sen. Mark Udall used his final speech from the
Senate floor last month to allude to the Panetta Review's conclusions. He
called it a "smoking gun" that showed the CIA is continuing to be
dishonest about its now-defunct enhanced-interrogation program, which several
former agency officials strongly defended after the Senate torture report's
release in December.

"The refusal to provide the full Panetta Review and
the refusal to acknowledge facts detailed in both the committee study and the
Panetta Review lead to one disturbing finding: Director Brennan and the CIA
today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and
misrepresent the efficacy of torture," Udall said. "In other words:
The CIA is lying."

Director Brennan has said the CIA has no plans to make
any part of the Panetta Review public, as it was outside the bounds of the
agreement brokered between Feinstein and Panetta when the intelligence panel
began its investigation in 2009.

Buckley was nominated by President Obama to become
inspector general and confirmed by the Senate
on Sept. 29, 2010. He is leaving the CIA after nearly 35 years in the
federal government, the agency said. It would not immediately disclose where in
the private sector Buckley was headed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
By Kashmir Hill Yesterday 2:20pm
Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed
to know about one of them.
Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep
separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma,
arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).
Her “real identity”—the public one, who lives in
California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics—joined
Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all;
for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a
different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May
Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the
names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.
Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook
information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her
real-world con…

The 15 Most Influential Websites of All TimeAlex Fitzpatrick,Lisa Eadicicco,Matt Peckham Updated:
Oct 20, 2017 10:55 AM ET | Originally published: Oct 18, 2017 The
web, or "world wide web" as we used to say, turns 27 years old on
December 20. On that date, nearly three decades ago, British engineer and
scientist Tim Berners-Lee launched the world's first website, running on a NeXT
computer at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear
Research) in Switzerland.

The website wasn't much at the time, just a few sentences
organized into topic areas that laid out the arguments for the concept. But it
established vital first principles still essential to the web as it exists
today: the notion of hyperlinks that reimagined documents (and eventually any
form of media) as nonlinear texts, and the ability for anyone, anywhere in the
world, to peruse that content by way of a browser: a piece of software that
cohered to universal formatting standards. It's been a wild ride since…

British supermarket offers 'finger vein' payment in
worldwide first
By Katie Morley, consumer affairs editor 20 SEPTEMBER
2017 • 1:04AM
A UK supermarket has become the first in the world to let
shoppers pay for groceries using just the veins in their fingertips.
Customers at the Costcutter store, at Brunel University
in London, can now pay using their unique vein pattern to identify themselves.
The firm behind the technology, Sthaler, has said it is
in "serious talks" with other major UK supermarkets to adopt hi-tech
finger vein scanners at pay points across thousands of stores.
It works by using infrared to scan people's finger veins
and then links this unique biometric map to their bank cards. Customers’ bank
details are then stored with payment provider Worldpay, in the same way you can
store your card details when shopping online. Shoppers can then turn up to the
supermarket with nothing on them but their own hands and use it to make
payments in just three …